Locking into Software-as-a-Service

by John Berry

One of the most persistent truths of information technology is the phenomenon called lock-in. Lock-in describes the fact that technology platforms do not naturally interoperate and that as users make commitments to specific platforms, they are "locked-in" to their decisions. This concept has collected a lot of dust over the years seeing as IT managers have endured this reality since the beginning of automation. In our increasingly Web-powered universe, however, lock-in and the related concept of switching costs is worth revisiting in both the context of the Web in general and the new technology paradigm software-as-a-service (SaaS) -- as some organizations discuss, even informally, the possibilities of using SaaS.